what is capitalism?

Capitalism is a system unfit for human beings. It is a system of war, poverty and environmental crisis. The basis of this system is class exploitation, whereby the mass of people have to live and work according to other people’s orders in the interest of profits. Billions of people groan under the weight of hierarchy, alienation and social breakdown. But why is this so? Karl Marx wrote a book called Capital, which despite its age, goes a long way to explaining why. Marx argued that both profit & rent actually came from value created by exploited workers. That by its very nature capitalism must put profits before people. It cannot be reformed, & that for human beings to be free, capitalism must be replaced by communism.

Share this:

Like this:

One thought on “what is capitalism?”

It all goes back to the concept of surplus value, that being the difference between the value added per hour (to a business) by a worker’s labour versus the wage the worker is paid per hour to perform that labour. With capitalism there literally HAS to be a huge difference between the two or else the business owner won’t be able to afford to pay his building rent, pay for utilities, buy merchandise to be retailed or raw materials to be turned into finished goods etc. Thus with capitalism the worker HAS to be exploited i.e. he or she has to be paid just a fraction of the value of his or her labour or else capitalism literally could not function a week.

Capitalist apologists can put a happy face on it and try to rationalise it all they want but it comes down to a system that cannot exist without the mass exploitation of the many by the priviliged few. Or put another way capitalism is all about those comparative few who have the capital to be able to exploit others exploiting everyone who doesn’t have the capital to be able to exploit anyone and is forced instead to sell his or her labour piecemeal in order to keep from starving. Capitalism is an abomination. It belongs in a museum next to Cro-Magnon Man and Java Man. The good news is that it is 100% inevitable that capitalism will ultimately be destroyed and the better capitalism is at doing what it does, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, concentrating more wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer greedy soulless people, the sooner it will bring about its own destruction at the hands of honest hungry people who have nothing left to lose.